


Adora & Catra in She-Ra Season Three

by cronaisawriter



Series: Misc Analysis [7]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Character Analysis, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Meta, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-13 00:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20165458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cronaisawriter/pseuds/cronaisawriter
Summary: an analysis of how these characters develop into season three and this effects their story.





	Adora & Catra in She-Ra Season Three

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Child Abuse, Trauma, Mentions of suicide

Catra and Adora are pretty good examples of two ways abused children can continue to live one finding a new ability to attach and choosing to heal and one becoming so preoccupied with the injustice they completely fall apart. Their individual circumstances during and after the trauma set the ground for their reactions, however, the story does show an element of choice in rather you can start climbing upwards or spiral downwards. 

## Adora:

Adora had a very strong upward trajectory in this season. One important factor is Adora finding healthy attachments with people who offered grounding connections, validated her emotions, and counteracted almost every negative cognitive distortions the abuse instilled in her. We see this pretty explicitly laid out in season 3 which was pretty powerful. 

Queen Angella protects her explicitly protecting her from her abuser who is a known gaslighter). Glimmer shows a great deal of healthy attachment. She has learned to read Adora better and offers her physical comfort to emotional distress, Bow also offers physical comfort even small gestures like putting his hand on her shoulder. This shows attunement from both her friends which means she has a next when she is struggling. Glimmer is protective of her friend too, telling off Shadow Weaver and willing to go to extremes to ensure that they can save her when she is captured. 

Glimmer also goes out of her way to support Adora, not just returning Adora’s support of Glimmer as a commander but explicitly supporting Adora’s emotional and psychological needs. Reminding bow that they are “ We are supporting her”. Glimmer and Bow also both help to counteract Adora’s self-blame, a particularly fun example is when Adora feels guilty for what happened in the Crimson Waste and then interrupts herself to comment on Huntara’s footprints she says “Exactly, it’s Huntara’s fault.” 

Adora also gains real strength. She is no longer seeking Shadow Weaver’s approval and can reject positive comments of manipulation from her mother with the negative ones. She learns to let go of the perfectionist and constant self-blame she dealt with telling Catra she is not responsible for what happened to the world nor is Catra’s suffering. 

Adora does make choices though, one big one is accepting the kindness. She can’t internalize it right off the bat but makes the choice to try her best. She also chooses to mak put her will to building up others, herself and the world instead of tearing it down. There is no choice in being abused and traumatized, but taking the pain into savings Eitheria and being kind to those who are kind to her.

## Catra:

With Catra we see much of Adora’s story completely inverted. One key thing is her staying in the Horde through season 2 and into the start of season 3 she is still being exposed to abuse and is in the same lifestyle as before. If we look at Catra’s interactions with Shadow Weaver in season 2 we see how she was unable to fully disconnect from her mother and still deeply craved her love and approval. This makes her betrayal extremely painful, the rejection of Hordak breaks her down to the point she doesn’t believe she should care for others or that she is worthy of being cared for. She puts herself in the fuck it mindset telling off Hordak, she accepts her likely death with a cynism. 

In the Crimson Waste, we see a large degree of this fuck it attitudes. She expresses being over even her own previous ways of dealing with trauma. An example is her comment on how “I’ve done the whole threatening thing”. She does, however, use her natural talent for manipulation to control those within the Crimson Waste. This displays that she does not see her own skills and accomplishments, this is also reflected in Entrapta having data showing Catra is skilled. Catra’s actions in the crimson waste and the earlier scenes with Hordak shows a reckless disregard for her well being and impulsiveness. 

Catra and Scorpia’s relationship is key for both of their plots this season. Catra returns Scorpia’s affections at least a bit and can put down her hypervigilance for a moment. During the party, Scorpia notices this commenting that she had never seen her smile before that. These interactions with Scorpia are one place where choice comes in with Catra. Catra often doesn’t show equal compassion back to her one real friend. To some degree, I think it took her a while to truly recognize the friendship, but she doesn’t choose to respect Scorpia. You can’t force yourself to believe you are loveable but she could choose to try and support Scorpia and not put her down for trying. Scorpia tries hard to tell offer the support Catra needs, saying thank you and returning the emotions even if it’s hard on a more consistent basis would have helped.

A full breakdown is triggered when Adora tells her that Shadow Weaver came to find her. This is powerful for her because it is another betrayal she feels from both of them, but it reinforces her inferiority complex, and it triggers her preoccupation with revenge. It sends her into a “burn it all to the fucking ground” mindset. It is essentially a suicide attempt and a murder attempt. You can see her physical posture and movements change. Her eyes change focus and her movements are more rigid. The actions she takes with the portal very much strikes me as thoughts like “everyone is going to leave me, I can never really be in charge, and everyone is going to hurt me” fueling her getting into the mindset of she can’t control anything so she will control her death and others. 

She, however, makes choices still, Catra is aware of the damage the portal will do but is willing to lie and possibly kill everyone to do this act of power. Her choice to lie to Hordak and attack Entrapta to get what she wants was also deeply manipulative. And lastly, she did not have to attack Adora to prevent her from fixing the damage Catra herself did. She would not accept responsibility but externalized her own personal mistakes on to other people, and transferred the riotous blame she had for Shadow Weaver to Adora, who was not responsible. 

Catra is responsible for what she did, I still find her to be a sympathetic and understandable character, it was wrong but the narrative supported her actions and they made sense (abuse makes hurt angry people). It is a story that is engaging to people and doesn’t feel like she snapped in a way that goes against her character. It was a ballsy choice on the creator’s side to not follow the common redemption arc formula and it went against a lot of the fandom who seem too overwhelming ship Catradora. Honestly negative character development is fascinating and heartbreaking.

This story also doesn’t bother me as much as normally making abuse survivors become villains because we also have Adora in this story. It becomes a story about a lot of different kinds of dysfunctional to abusive situations in the parent-child dynamics, I don’t think it supports the victims become abuser narratives. I see it closer to an Azula/Zuko or Gamora/nebula type situation. Though in contrast with Azula & Zuko the scapegoat became the person to perpetuate the violence.

However like with Azula Catra is fun to watch as a villain, she’s intimidating, the corrupted Catra design is just fantastic. On a just viewing pleasure level, it is well done, which in storytelling having a compelling and fun character is the most important part.

**Their relationship:**

Catra & Adora are mirrors of each other in many ways which makes their opposite development tracks narratively compelling. Another thing is Adora finally truly accepts she is not responsible for Catra and she let’s go of her longing for Catra to come with her and be a family again. She recognizes catra is aware of what she is doing, and is hurt that she was willing to hurt people to do it. Learning to no longer carry intense self-blame was also deeply key here. 

Catra’s externalization and blaming Adora for her pain becomes more intense, and her totally breakdown leads to the remaining compassionate ties breaking. The need to control Adora continues in this season. An interesting reflection of the relationship is the fantasy world built from the portal is Catra wanted to stay, not just the recklessness of being okay with people getting hurt but in that world, she and Adora had everything they had planned on before. Catra also looks truly afraid of Adora after the portal closes, something we really only saw while She-Ra was infected. 

This was a very important arc for both of their characters taking a huge step each of their single stories and struck a new paradigm before them. One way of framing this is also taking Catra from an antagonist to a full villain.


End file.
